The SEAwise Team: Elliot Brown

Elliot Brown,  Baltic Sea Case Study Lead – DTU Aqua

How is EBFM important to you?

The ethereal EBFM isn’t any one thing, but a concept or ‘collection’ of approaches in which we address our ignorance of the important interactions between fisheries and the broader environment.

EBFM is important to me as an entity that represents the perpetual improvement in our understanding of the marine environment and our place in it. This continuous improvement is what I, as a scientist, strive for in my research, and our collective understanding is what I apply when producing advice.

Which aspects of Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management interest you most, and why?

I’m particularly interested in two elements of EBFM. The first is the subject in which I am trained – environmental drivers of species distributions and productivity – and in which I hope to discover more novel things about the marine environment. The second is how we aggregate and synthesise knowledge from different disciplines to produce advice for the management of these complex systems. While far removed from the fundamental ecology of marine ecosystems, I’m motivated by the explosion of new knowledge we’ve created since the start of my career, and how we can seek to digest and learn from it, allowing it to inform the way we manage our resources. 

While I focus on these two topics, I’m happy to be surrounded by colleagues with a broad range of skills and expertise – between us, we can explore all elements central to an ecosystem based approach.

How do you think your work in SEAwise will improve Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management?

Coming back to my interests, I hope that my work on the effects of hypoxia on fish productivity and distribution will have a direct impact on the way fisheries advice and marine spatial planning are produced, especially in the Baltic Sea (where basin scale hypoxia is a persistent pressure). Ultimately, I hope that my work on synthesising existing knowledge and the new findings from SEAwise will contribute to an accessible tool that other scientists, policy makers, managers and the broader public can use to better understand the marine environment, how we depend on it, and how it responds to our activities.

Elliot’s research has focused on a wide range of subjects from fish physiology to socio-ecological model building. He works with coastal and recreational fisheries, and is experienced in stakeholder collaboration, citizen science and systematic reviews. Within SEAwise, Elliot leads the Baltic Sea Case Study.